Evaluating potential Markets
Before entering foreign markets, evaluating their potential for generating adequate return on investment is a heavy duty task. To help ease the burden, many indicators and indexes exist. One such index is Michigan State Universities’ market potential indicator.
The most recent version of the Market Potential Indicators is found at http://globaledge.msu.edu/ibrd/marketpot.asp. Previous versions of the indicators are at http://ciber.msu.edu/Research/MPI/default.asp.
The indicator is a weighted average of many factors. Market size, which is measured by Urban population and electricity used has a weight of 20%. Other dimensions are Market Growth rate, Market freedom and Country Risk.
The Economic Freedom index is published by The Heritage Foundation. This years economic freedom index can be found at http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/countries.cfm. This page sorts countries in four different categories, Free, Mostly Free, Mostly Unfree and Repressed. More details about each country can be found by clicking on its name. For example, Brazil, Russia, India and China all are classified as mostly unfree.
Political freedom index is published by Freedomhouse and can be found at http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/survey2005.htm
The Economist of course has a long standing weekly indicators. The Economic and Financial Indicators are at http://www.economist.com/markets/indicators/index.cfm?page=Economic%20and%20Financial while their Emerging Market indicators are at http://www.economist.com/markets/indicators/index.cfm?page=Emerging%20Market. The organization is nice too. They have a summary before throwing a whole bunch of data at you.
A very interesting fact that almost jumps out at you from the Financial Market indicators of The Economist is that the short term interest rates are close to 20% in Brazil. This makes you wonder, what is the impact of this on growth rates. On the page for Economic indicators, Brazil’s GDP growth is listed at 4.9. This does fall in the bottom quartile of the growth rates listed there. In China they are 2.3% while in India it is 5.1%. Honk Kong and Taiwan have rates close to 1.5% each.
Tidbits
The Economist
They used to have separate sections for free and premium content articles. Now, it appears that they have combined the two into one. If a visitor is not a subscriber to their print edition, the visitor has the option of viewing an ad to get a free one day pass to access all of their content. This is a good step.
Monitoring Indian Economy
The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (and no, the spelling for centre is not a typo – that’s how they spell it in India), is an independent economic think tank headquartered in Mumbai. They specialize in monitoring and researching the Indian economy providing databases and research reports.
Monitoring Hong Kong’s Economy
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority, is a government office which reports to the Financial Secretary of Hong Kong.
Special Economic Zones in India
India is planning special economic zones for foreign entities. You can read more about it at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4531703.stm.
Perspective on China
A perspective piece on BBC about China makes for a nice read. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4508287.stm
1 Comments:
I would definitely recommend WetFeet's series on interviewing, finding a job, resume writing, etc. Right now they are selling a package that includes an interviewing tutorial video, and it's only $79. All of the books are really useful for recent grads or people graduating soon, but can be just as useful 10 years later.
Link: http://shop.wetfeet.com/promo/gradpack.aspx
Post a Comment
<< Home